Rifftrax Diy - Have you made one?

[Mighty Jack]

Has anyone tried out that cuts.com over at rifftrax? I gave it a shot on a short trailer. It was pretty fun.

Here's mine if you wanna see it.

Wild Guitar

[Mighty Jack]

And I just did another. These are fun and addctive... Frankenstein Conquers the World

Yeah I repeated a joke, but it fit.

[MSTJedi]

Man, I can't even get the site to work, let alone make one.

[Captain Hygiene]

MJ, I'd love to see what you've done, but I've never gotten the site to load. It just freezes my Firefox browser. Even in Internet Explorer, I let it sit for about 90 minutes yesterday while I did other stuff, and it still hadn't loaded up.

[Mighty Jack]

Well that's a bummer. It ran slow for me to, but it did run. Man I wish I knew how to transfer them to you tube.

[mrtorso]

captainhygiene said:

MJ, I'd love to see what you've done, but I've never gotten the site to load. It just freezes my Firefox browser. Even in Internet Explorer, I let it sit for about 90 minutes yesterday while I did other stuff, and it still hadn't loaded up.

Running the latest flash player??

[wilson]

Hey !

That was fun


won't you ?


www.cuts.com/cut/2e2150aaf5/

(( Ha ! , I used the "Bill, please kill Kevin" line cuz there's a Bill character . . forgot about those Riffers for a sec there ! ))

[Mighty Jack]

There's one on there called Molly Grows Up by NummyMuffin that's a riot. He/she really did a great job of matching up the scenes with riffs and adding his own stuff.

That's the difficult thing, finding just the right sound bite to fit the situation. It was time consuming and difficult to remember what riff I wanted, even when I started charting them. And I was doing 2 minute clips, not a 14 minute short like Nummy did.


Edit:
I couldn't sleep and feeling depressed, so I did another for a pick me up. I think it's my best.... The Giant Claw

[Sandstorm]

I love making DIY riffs at cuts.com, but I think their site's popularity has been held back because of technical issues. I can't in good conscience link to my videos there due to the slow load times. That's the whole reason I created my YouTube channel with instant loading DIY riffs that were originally created through cuts.com .

The conversion process takes a bit more work, but I actually have fun doing it. Plus, there's more flexibility to be had.

Click the pic below for my latest conversion...

Another benefit in doing it this way, is that your final riffed video is then protected against deletion from the person that uploaded the original YouTube clip (if they remove their clip from YouTube, you can say bye bye to all the hard work you put into riffing it).

If anyone's interested in this process, just let me know and I'll be glad to elaborate.

[Mighty Jack]

i've tried to save them at youtube but lack the brainpower to figure it out. too bad to read that the vids aren't saved in some way. bummer to think it could all fade to nothing.


And yes please elaborate

[Sandstorm]

Yeah, it is a bummer. It's happened to two of my video's at cuts.com . My favorite was one riffing on the Buck Rogers TV show. All that remains is the icon. You click on it... wait about 5 minutes... only to be told that this video is no longer available. Grrrrrrr!!!!

It made me so mad, I ordered an old Buck Rogers VHS off of Amazon.com , and am going to upload the portion myself and then try and reconstruct the riff from memory.

[Mighty Jack]

I checked out your stuff, very good, very funny. Loved that Megaforce, what a goofy flick and the Doomsday from Trek was great.

But we need more sound bites, we're all using the same ones and it'll get redundant after a while

[Captain Hygiene]

Well, I got 'em to work, but I can't seem to load anything longer than about a minute and a half when I'm trying to add my own riffs. I'll check yours out soon though.

[Sandstorm]

mj said:

But we need more sound bites, we're all using the same ones and it'll get redundant after a while

You're quite correct... which is why I added some riffs of my own in Megaforce. I'm also gonna start pulling riffs from old MST3K episodes, as well as pulling some from CT as well. That should help mix things up a bit!

mj said:

And yes please elaborate

Ok... to elaborate.

First, you're going to need video editing software and audio editing software. I personally use Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition... but there's plenty of others (including shareware ones) that would work just fine.

The preferred way to start the process is to be the one that uploads the content to YouTube in the first place. I created a dummy YouTube channel that becomes the temporary holding place for these videos. The reason I create this dummy channel is because I have some folks that have subscribed to my "official" channel. They expect to see riffed videos, and I don't want them getting notified of an un-riffed video that's part of a work in progress.

If you want to riff on someone else’s video that already resides on YouTube, then you're going to want to make use of a YouTube video grabber. I suggest a simple and free program called "1-Click YouTube Downloader" for this step. Then, you're going to want to re-upload it to your dummy YouTube page, along with converting it to a video format that your editing software will accept. The video format will be FLV (Flash video), and it's likely that you're video editing software won't accept this (at least Premiere doesn't). So you're going to want to use another piece of free software... such as "Prism" to do the conversion into a format that your editing software will work with.

Once you're video is uploaded, you riff on it at cuts.com just like you normally would. Once that's done, you open up your audio editing software, and record the audio as you're playing back the riffed video. You may have to go into the audio mixer settings and select the appropriate "input" (not output) for this to work. If the "input" is current set to "Line" in or "Mic", then it's not going to work. You'll probably need to change it to either "Wave" or "What You Hear" (this can vary from one machine to another depending on your audio hardware and drivers).

I'm trying to keep this as simple as I can, but the alternative route is to actually grab the audio of the individual riffs you want to use and bring them into your video editing software. This can add a lot of flexibility. For example, you could intermix yourself into the riffing, or add a riffs from another source such as an old MST3K episode. Just remember, if you do it this way you'll have to manually lower and raise the audio of the soundtrack (during each riff so they can be better heard) yourself. I've gotten use to doing this, but cuts.com will do this for you automatically... so you might want to start out that way.

Ok, so you have the video you want to riff in you video editing software, and you have the audio you recorded of your riffed video at cuts.com . Now you simply bring the riffed version of the audio into your timeline and sync it as closely as you can. This is very easy in Premiere but I can't speak to the ease in others. Once you've done this, either delete or mute the original audio on the timeline, and export the video in a format that YouTube will accept.

Now upload it to your "official" YouTube channel, and you’re done. If you like, you can now delete both the video from the dummy channel (if you do it the same way I do) and from cuts.com . The funny thing is, you could now add it to your videos at cuts.com , except the riffing will already be intact. Only problem is, the load time will still take forever (go figure), so you're better off sending folks to your YouTube page.

That's it in a nutshell. I can go into more detail about specifics if needed.

As a side note, I'm considering doing this for others as a service (free of course). It would just be a matter of telling me which of your masterpieces at cuts.com you'd like to have as an Inst-Load YouTube video. More on that soon.

[Mighty Jack]

That's cool, hell if you did it I'd pay you in MST eps from sky if there's any you need.

Not that it wouldn't be fun to try myself. The whole process kind of reminds me of being in the recording studio when your doing patch jobs or adjusting an instrument. You gotta fit it in just right.

I actually enjoy trying to get a riff to fit perfectly, I'll tweek it a hair here or there. You'd think I was working on a real, paying project. (and yeah, there have been times when I thought, "A certain mst3k sound bite would be perfect here")

On an aside, they have dowloaded a lot more quickly for me today. I don't know why, but it's been a relatively short wait (Not youtiube short of course) last night and this afternoon.